Southern Colorado sees it all...sometimes in the same day! Snow along the Palmer Divide...strong downslope winds just east of the mountains...frost in Pueblo and tee-shirt like warmth in Colorado Springs.
Take this morning's temperatures as an example. The low in Colorado Springs was 41. In Pueblo...19. In Lamar...12! Let's explore each area.
Colorado Springs sits at six thousand feet of elevation. The terrain gets higher north and west of the Springs and is lower to the east. During the daytime, our weather engine - the Sun - heats the ground. This makes the ground warmer than air significantly above it. To boil it down: our mountain tops are typically colder during the day time than the low elevations on the plains.
But things change when the Sun goes away. Cold air is dense and tends to sink. This means the cold air from the higher terrain flows past Colorado Springs on its way downhill.
At the same time...whenever the wind direction is out of the west...air gets pushed over the mountains...falls to the Springs...and warms up due to compressional warming.
Pueblo sits in a valley. You can think of it like a big bowl. When cold air falls into it, it tends to hang out and collect. That's why Pueblo was so cold this morning.
The eastern plains are even lower than Pueblo. Since cold air sinks...Lamar and other east plains locations were the coldest locations this morning.
Now let's talk about this afternoon. We were tracking downslope winds across all of southern Colorado. But only our southern zones have fire weather warnings. This is again due to our microclimates.
The gaps in between our mountain ranges are called gap regions. When we have downslope winds from the southwest...air gets pushed through these gaps and speeds up. So today, our strongest winds have been in the southern plains east of the gap between two mountain groups. These winds are also very dry and leading to very low relative humidity levels.
This is why we had fire weather warnings east of those gaps. So in short...fire danger was enhanced for all of us but the stronger winds in the south tier are why the risk was highest there.
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